Business Goals and Architecture

Abstract

Software systems exist to fulfill the business goals of organizations – developing organizations, purchasing organizations, user organizations, and others – and these goals turn out to be a significant source of requirements. These requirements are not currently well understood and are seldom captured explicitly, yet they can have a profound effect on the architecture for a system. Systems that meet the published requirements but do not satisfy the important business goals are considered failures. Our research has produced a standard categorization of business goals that can be used to aid in elicitation and capture. We have also created a form for a business goal scenario, which is an expression to capture a stakeholder’s business goal in an unambiguous form, along with its pedigree, by which we mean its source, value, and stability. Finally, we have used these developments to create a lightweight method that architects can use to interview important stakeholders and elicit and record their business goals. The method also includes a step in which the architectural ramifications of the business goal (in the form of quality attribute requirements) are compared against the existing requirements for the system, to help spot missing requirements and requirements that have no basis in business goals. All of this is intended to empower an architect to ask the right questions early in the development process, when the architecture is being crafted.